Third Time Lucky

It's been a couple of weeks since I last wrote anything. That's because of three things that happened in quick succession. A reluctance to write stuff was not one of these things. I've actually quite missed the blog and that has to be a sign that I should keep doing it.

First thing that happened:

The BBC linked to my post. The actual BBC. I freaked out. I freaked out quite a lot. For the first ten minutes I very literally could not string "The BBC has linked to my blog" into a sentence:
Me: "They... They... They..."
Colleague: "Who?"
Me: "The BBC! They... They... They..."
Colleague: "The BBC what?"
Me: "They... The BBC... They..."

It went on for a while.

On a number of levels I'm not actually surprised, I've read the blurb about the blog linking before. I just never really expected it to actually happen. Especially as the BBC bot found my post less than 30 minutes after I'd posted it. And if they were going to link to my blog, why did it have to be a post where I commented on steamy almost-sex scenes written after far too long spent travelling?

Then there was thing two:

In case you can't quite work out what that can possibly be (and many people have wondered) it is a cardboard house, complete with flaps and knitted sand bags to help get across the facts about the impacts of the Summer 2007 floods. 

Obviously.

I'm still not entirely certain how I volunteered to make this, or how it seemed a good idea to take the "house with flaps for questions made out of a crisp box" concept and instead decide to make a three-storey house complete with photos of ikea interiors and a chimney with smoke. But I do know that it ate up a lot of hours and a lot of PVA glue.

Directly or indirectly, the late nights involved with thing two led inevitably to thing three:

I came down with a mutant cold/flu/virus thing that has left me with the world's most annoying cough. I'm not going to apologise for the self-pity. Ill people get to do self-pity.

The point where everyone seemed to realise that I wasn't making it up was when they realised I'd been off work for three days and I hadn't done any knitting! Now that's proper illness!

It wasn't until Sunday night that I actually managed to pick up my knitting again. I'd love to say that I was struck with renewed determination, that the days of rest had left me charged up and ready to demolish any knitting challenge in mere hours. Hardly. On one hand, I was quite glad to be doing something other than lying in bed doing pointless self-pity. On the other, I wanted to go back to bed and do a bit more self-pity.

But this brings me on to the subject of my post and, believe me, Third Time Lucky does not refer to the three things that have kept me off the internet for two weeks. No.

<insert dramatic drum roll>

I have (finally) finished Winterthorn version three! And, not only is it finished, but it's actually the right size! I've been showing it to everyone in work who has ever expressed even a passing interest in knitting! Unfortunately it's still too dark while I'm home to get pictures but, come the weekend, nothing's going to stop me photographing this thing, repeatedly.

I finished it Monday evening and blocked it with more care and attention than anything I've ever blocked before. I tried to prepare myself: Maybe it would be too big again. Maybe I'd stretch the rib too much during blocking. Maybe it would be too small. Maybe my experimental decreasing on a coluple of rows would be too obvious. Maybe I don't actually like the cream colour I've used.

In the end, it has turned out to be exactly what I first imagined when I woke up with a hat in my head in December. The final verdict is: 2.75mm needles and sensible 4ply wool. Now all I have to do is to write up the pattern, find a way to fit a 200-stitch chart into a PDF and publish it.

I hadn't given much thought to what yarn I'll recommend on the pattern but, now that I've completed the final (definitely final) Winterthorn, I think it's going to have to be the Rowan Pure Wool 4ply. I have a bit of a thing against Rowan wool and I know it doesn't really deserve it. In my head, I think of it as rather boring and overpriced. Well, I'm going to try to be nicer about Rowan in the future: the 4 ply was an absolute pleasure to work with and it has a loveley springiness about it that demands to go into a hat!

When I started out on this I never imagined that it would take three hats before I'd be happy. I never imagined it'd be March before I felt ready to write up the pattern. But I do know now that I'm happy with what I've designed and I'm confident that it works. It's given me the opportunity to try a few things (most of which haven't worked) and helped to add to my needle collection (I had no 2.75mm circulars or DPNs until now). Plus, I now have more hats and who can complain about that?

So, overall, this has been a positive experience. It's just that it has involved quite a bit more cursing, frustration and focus groups of my colleagues than most positive experiences!

The Power of the Internet

For a geek I'm shockingly technophobic. I don't have a smart phone, I've never bought anything from e-bay and I just don't understand what the big deal about twitter is. The internet has a lot of benefits but championing brevity through messages of 140 characters? Is that really the best of use those sizeable resources of bandwidth, boredom and creativity?

Of course not.

I'm used to being behind the times on technological developments and crowd sourcing is no exception. The difference is that even those of us that took years to get a facebook account and still think that RT stands for Radio Times can understand the benefits of crowd sourcing.

Crowd sourcing plays to the internet's biggest strength: the internet brings together people with a common purpose. Anyone who has taken part in an internet forum will know the sheer weight of pressure that can be brought to bear once a group of users have been roused by a righteous cause or grievous injustice. It's staggering.

If anything, the only surprise is that it's taken this long for people to realise what a phenomenal resource this is. Okay, from a software point of view it's not so new (remember the SETI program that would find aliens using tiny amounts of your processing power?). But it's not crowd sourcing of software that has really inspired me over the last few months, it's crowd funding.

There are a lot of statistics bandied about but everyone has seen a variation on those spammy chain e-mails that put our first-world wealth into proportion. I'm not claiming that everyone on the internet has cash to throw around but, if you have access to the internet then there's a good chance that you have a computer. Internet users are a group that, on the whole, is not living on the bread line.

So you have a group of people. They like communicating. They might have a little cash to spend on things they care about. And they're GOOD at caring about things. Really, really good at it. Thanks to the internet, those people can now be connected to the things that they care about and really put that mob mentality (in the nicest possible sense) to some use.

A few weeks ago I mentioned Unbound and the Warhorses of Letters book and I'll admit that there's something magical about helping books come into existence. But it wasn't the first public funding site I joined, that is a micro-financing site called Kiva.

The idea is simple: If you can spare $25 (around £15) then you can help people around the world. The site lists hundreds of small business owners who need loans to improve their business. And we're not talking about big loans, some are as small as just $125. Together with dozens or hundreds of other people - each with their £15 - you fund that loan. It's not a charity donation, they pay you back a little every month and, although there are some defaults, there is a 98.8% repayment rate.

It's really quite addictive. So far I've helped:

• Essi, a 32 year-old woman from Togo to improve her charcoal-selling business
• Marlene from Peru to buy new stock for her clothes shop
• Babak from Azerbaijan to diversify the stock in his food & drink shop

Is there a better use of £15? I don't think so.

Less altruistic but more creative is Kickstarter. Fancy supporting an independent film maker? Kickstarter has dozens! Want to help bring an album into being? Kickstarter can sort it for you. Art installations, performance pieces, games, comics, design, fashion, theatre... the list is extensive and Kickstarter has it all.

Much like Unbound, you donate money and you get a reward. Rewards are better the more you donate. It might be a copy of the book/film/clock that you're funding, or a walk-on part, or an executive directors credit or....

You get the point.

Although I came to kickstarter through a much geekier route, I am now helping to fund a graphic design student who wants to knit a 7ft-wide map of the world. Without leaving my sofa I have supported an art project and, in return, I will get: a knitting pattern; a high-quality photo of the map; and the warm feeling that comes with knowing that I helped someone achieve something pretty crazy and epic.

But crazy and epic doesn't happen without yarn. A lot of yarn.

Help her get yarn.